Lost and found

All bikes are fit­ted with a nav tower hold­ing the nav­i­ga­tion gear plus an emer­gency bea­con. Of­fi­cials pro­vide just a road­book and a GPS tracker. Dave Peck­ham runs ICO Racing, which makes the ad­di­tional nav­i­ga­tion equip­ment fit­ted to nearly ev­ery bike.

“So the ba­sic essence of rally nav­i­ga­tion is a pa­per scroll of driv­ing di­rec­tions and on that scroll is a num­ber, which is the to­tal num­ber of kilo­me­tres that you’ve rid­den so far. Next to this is a pic­ture that tells you a left turn, a right turn, a round­about, a tree… what­ever is in­ter­est­ing at that dis­tance.

“The most fun­da­men­tal as­pect is ad­vanc­ing that pa­per, track­ing along with your odome­ter and turn­ing when­ever the two match. It’s tricky as there’s al­ways a bit of er­ror. So if you get lost, by the time you get back on track the pic­ture in the road­book might be at 50.3km but your odome­ter reads 54km. Work­ing out where you went wrong and re­set­ing that ac­cu­mu­lated er­ror is the hard­est part.”